Commercial transactions of nearly all sorts have become dependent on networked computing. Because of this, the business performance of many organizations has become tied to the performance of computer networks and various components of the networks. As these networked systems have evolved and businesses have become more dependent on them, tools have developed for network administrators to monitor the performance of the network and of the various network components. However, it has been difficult to transition the technical aspects of network and network component performance monitoring into the business aspects of network performance.
What is needed in the art is a way to link the performance of business tasks, i.e., transactions, to the underlying and supporting information technology (“IT”) infrastructure. This linking serves three important functions, which may also be viewed as temporally sequential phases: discovery, diagnosis, and administration/prediction. The discovery function allows both business and technical managers to ascertain what IT components (clients, servers, network links, etc.) are used by a particular transaction, and, conversely, to determine what transactions require the use of a particular IT component. The discovery phase also helps to identify which transactions are affected by outages or other problems. Once this information is known, the second phase, diagnosis, allows business and technical managers to determine the cause of a performance problem with respect to a particular transaction and/or IT component and how to remedy the performance problem. Once the discovery and diagnosis phases are completed, business and technical managers can use this information administer existing resources (e.g., charge IT costs back to individual departments on a usage basis) and predict the need for future IT resources or scheduled maintenance, etc.
This need for information can be met by a system disclosed herein, which comprises computer software executable on a machine running on the computer network to discover the components of a particular transaction or service.